Inferring the Analogical Position of the Person of the Holy Spirit from Scripture and Tradition
Let’s analyze linguistic frames, because they are incredibly powerful
The linguist George Lakoff has helped illuminate how metaphors deeply structure our understanding in his work Metaphors We Live By, and a variety of related material. The underlying idea is pretty simple to grasp, and extremely valuable.
Let’s illustrate how Lakoff’s idea of “frames” works by looking at a simple example. Consider that we can understand a conversation in a lot of ways: as a dance, as a battle, as an adventure of discovery, as an exhausting slog through mud, as the bursting of new light as insights dawn on us, and more. These basic metaphors are not merely conceptual, because they also engage our bodies when activated and they tend to bubble up again and again in related language. For example, if we see a conversation as a dance we might consider moments where the partners draw near and when they pull apart, when great leaps are made and when little steps are made in sync… and the deep dance frame will structure our interpretation and visceral experiences of each of these. The conversation framed in this way will feel more fun and playful, even where it is challenging. But imagine, instead, if someone deeply frames the conversation as a battle. Now that very same language takes on an altogether different character: yes, the warriors there in combat draw near and pull apart. Great leaps are made: acts of aggression or cowardice! Even the little steps that are made in sync become sinister. Perhaps there is some shuffling as one combatant plunges a dagger into the others’ guts. In Lakoff’s analysis, deep frames are metaphors that structure entire sets of other, more superficial, metaphors. As such, these deep frames are an incredibly powerful linguistic, psychological, and social phenomenon. Their analysis helps us see how we are being steered, at times, and how people can steer themselves and others.
The power of frames and metaphors is a soulful power. By this, I mean that it integrates thought and lived bodily experience, as dancing and combat both do as well. When we come to explicitly understand the frames that people are using, we can often gain deep, intuitive and quickly-processed insights into the approaches they are taking to situations. Additionally, we can also use frame analysis to structure our own communications. If you consider the frame you are using, such as “this conversation is a dance”, you can then be more cognizant of the related vocabulary you’re using to communicate this deeper structure. You can also consider whether that secondary vocabulary unambiguously points back to the original deep frame, or if (perhaps) it is likely to be received differently by someone who is operating with another deep frame.
This brief crash course on framing theory can carry you pretty far, pretty quickly. Why? Because the idea of frames is powerful and intuitive for humans. Where does this power come from? Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow provides helpful psychological insight here, with some of the language that has come to define our era. We can think of our brain as having two basic systems. First, there is an extremely fast, efficient and powerful System 1 that is responsible for things we do quickly, like seeing or speaking in a familiar way. The work of System 1 is most of what is going on in our brains, and it is the elephant in the room of human psychology. It is like this fabled elephant in two ways. First, it has far more power and efficiency than slower processes, which Kahneman bundles together as System 2. Second, like the proverbial, it is somehow invisible despite its centrality. In a way, we barely notice System 1 because it is always so near and so fast, and its results feel obvious and so are taken for granted. It is a remarkable system, but it has known exploits that can be manipulated fairly easily by people who understand them. On the other hand, our System 2 is associated with things like math and the acquisition of new languages, and it can correct mistakes that System 1 makes from time to time. However, this system uses a lot of sugar, takes time, requires us to feel calm and focused, and can rather easily be taken for a ride by System 1. By learning to understand the interplay of the two systems, we can make better use of the enormous power and efficiency of System 1 while strategically deploying the precious, expensive, and particular power of our System 2. Lakoff’s framing theory does just this: by making deep and unconscious System 1 frames explicit, it gives us a way for our conscious and deliberative resources, our System 2, to sometimes notice, tame, and ride the elephant in the room.
With this psychological linguistic theory in view, we’re going to analyze two deep frames that are used for the Trinity in Christian theology. Going forward, I will follow the Lakoffian convention of identifying our deep frames with all capital letters. We will consider two deep frames here: SPEECH and FAMILY. The first frame starts with the idea of a Speaker and develops from there, while the second starts with the idea of a Father and develops in a similar way. We will then look at the evidence from Christian scripture and tradition to illuminate the deep frames involved in those bodies of literature.
This analysis should be of great interest to all kinds of people, whether you’re religious or not. I’ll spend substantially less time on the first frame (SPEECH), which is generally considered uncontentious in theology. It will serve as a simple model for the analysis that follows much more deeply in the second frame (FAMILY), which is fascinatingly contentious (as family matters so often are). The upshot of this analysis, if it is correct, is that the deep frames embedded in Christian Scripture and tradition remain at work even where efforts are made to overlay it with System 2 work; the deep frames of SPEECH and FAMILY will always be the elephants in the room. This is how deeply and enduringly powerful frames are: even thousands of years of unintentional and intentional erasure cannot eliminate them.
In his song Democracy, Leonard Cohen seems to personify deep frames of a millenial and Biblical scope. For me, his language speaks to the sort of power we find in such deep frames, and of the hope this power can provide for the creation of a soulful, embodied, reflective, creative, tradition-preserving, and rational public sphere:
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the USA
I hope that he is right, and I hope that public reflection on deep frames can play a role in encouraging a renewal and deepening of discursive democracy, even as they illuminate its deepest ancient wells.
SPEECH: Speaker-Word-Breath
This one will be short. Genesis 1 uncontroversially describes a speaker called Elohim who creates the universe by saying things, such as “Let there be light.” It is extremely easy to identify the one who speaks in these cases as someone who is framed as a Speaker. Additionally, another noun is used before this Speaker starts to speak: Ruach, which means Breath or Spirit. People can and do therefore infer that there is, in addition to Elohim or within the relation of Elohim, another aspect of speaking being named here: Breath. Because the whole account is framed by SPEECH, the concept of Breath naturally and easily assimilates to this frame in this context.
Within the Christian tradition, John 1 explicitly calls back to Genesis 1 and adds something to the story. In an unmistakable and deliberate echo of the beginning of the text, John 1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This text nicely fills out the SPEECH frame and suggests a deep unity of the distinct elements in the frame. The introduction of “Word” here is powerful and illuminating precisely because it builds on SPEECH.
The result is that John draws out a “Word” concept from Genesis 1, making something implicit into something explicit. But the insertion isn’t forced, because it draws on the deep metaphor that is already framing the entire discussion. And so, the tradition of interpretation and reinterpretation carries the past forward in a coherent way that deeply maps to our System 1 processing even as it brings the careful reflection of System 2 to bear on the structuring metaphor. We come out with a coherent, easily understood, and only somewhat novel way of reading Genesis 1. Each time it says, “God said” we are now given to understand a Speaker-Word-Breath combination to be operative, as the invisible Word from the Speaker becomes vocalized in the Breath and so becomes perceivable. Much can be written about this deep frame, and a truly enormous amount of literature has been written on the topic. Nonetheless, we can tell if someone is really tracking fairly easily if we return to the simple and deep metaphorical frame that is at work psychosocially in the articulation and use of the related language.
FAMILY: Father-Son-X
Another deep frame is also used for the Trinity in Christian theology. Like Speaker-Word-Breath, this one draws on extremely basic and universal words and categories. We could provide this familial pattern of “Father-Son-X” to a child and let them fill out the X. Their responses would certainly include some of the following: brother, sister, grandchild, mother, second dad, grandma, etc. Clearly, some kind of familial relation will structure whatever the metaphor is.
Fascinatingly, the basic Christian formula here substitutes a term from the deep frame of SPEECH instead, using the redolent word “Holy Spirit” where one would expect to find a third familial analogy. Nonetheless, bearing in mind that Father and Speaker also map, and that Son and Word also map, we are invited into a fascinating little sociolinguistic puzzle. Importantly, regardless of any other opinion or theological work that might be done around this, Father and Son establish a deep frame of FAMILY that generates enduring and enormous psychological incentives to complete the triad with a third familial term, just as “Word” completes SPEECH coherently. Our question now is this: what concept and word best fits with the deep FAMILY frame in a way that satisfyingly completes this chart:
In the most general and basic layer of these texts, the Holy Spirit is represented by the word Spirit and through two other key terms: a dove, and fire. This provides us with a basic triad of linguistic terms and associated images to work from, in trying to reconstruct the underlying familial frame. The Holy Spirit’s theophanies (divine self-revelations) take the forms of Spirit, Dove and Fire. Let’s look at the related terms in the Hebrew Scriptures first, because of the religious frame of reference and the nearness of Aramaic and Hebrew. There will also be brief notes on the Greek. For the speech community of the Word (identified by John as Jesus), Hebrew provides the source for the relevant deep frames, which are then translated (with all of the hazards of cultural and linguistic translation) from spoken Aramaic to written Greek. Because this is a psycholinguistic framing analysis, we will move from a reconstruction of the spoken word to writing because writing is psycholinguistically and temporally secondary to the spoken word. In an interesting echo of this reality, in the Biblical texts the speech frame precedes family as well. And so we will also proceed from SPEECH to FAMILY.
Spirit
Spirit corresponds to the feminine word “ruach” (ר֣וּח) in Hebrew, and this is the word we find in Genesis 1. The Greek equivalent is the neuter word “pneuma” (πνεῦμα). Ruach is well-attested in the Hebrew Scriptures, occurring 375 times. We can divide the basic meanings of the word into two broad groups: breath and wind.
Under the category of breath, “ruach” develops a wide range of associations with the breath of God, life, authoritative speech, experiences (especially strong emotions) and will and intellect. And just as each of these can be turned toward evil, we have both positive and negative variants of the linguistic play around the basic category of breath. So for example: breath of God, Spirit of God, breath of life, life, prophetic speech (both true and false), prophetic judgment and burning, vain and “windy” blathering, the heat of living breath, good instruction/counsel/knowledge, leadership and authority, and it also bears associations with courage and other strong emotions. Significantly, the ruach in Genesis 1 is described as “quavering” or “hovering” over creation. This rare word is used two other times in the Hebrew Bible. Once it is associated with an eagle or vulture protecting or teaching its young. The other time, it is associated with Jeremiah’s quaking knees as he receives prophetic inspiration. One possible association with this quavering bird of prey is the Egyptian goddess Nekhbet, who is especially associated with Northern Egypt, motherhood, and is often depicted hovering. This background makes sense in its context in Deuteronomy 32 as well, because it refers to the sons of Israel ‘leaving the nest’ of Egypt and being born into their own distinctive worship of the true God alone. This language of quavering or hovering is used in the Greek Scriptures to call back to the Ruach in Genesis, in association with dove imagery. This conceptually and poetically connects the Dove (to be discussed next) with the Ruach. The dove seems to deeply appropriate and transform the same maternal associations that in Egypt attached to the vulture goddess Nekhbet instead.
Under the category of wind, “ruach” is associated with the four winds, lifting winds, clouds and tempests blown on the wind, ‘fiery winds’, winds that blow away chaff, and the vanity of chasing the wind.
Like the Word, the Ruach becomes personified in Christian Scripture and tradition. She is named as the Holy Spirit at the start of the Gospel narratives, in association with the birth narratives with Mary and the baptismal rebirth narratives when Jesus is baptized. Drawing on the Hebrew background of Ruach, we can say this: She is the Person of the Trinity who gives life, authority and authoritative speech, wisdom and good counsel, and appropriate emotional responses including courage and jealous love. We might also say that She rules as far as the four winds blow, lifts us up to God, and blows away the chaff that has been winnowed … but you cannot catch Her by chasing after Her unless She comes to you.
So the witness of Scripture, once the Holy Spirit is understood as a person, is powerfully suggestive. Here is a feminine and authoritative person. Perhaps a grandmother or mother? In terms of the language surrounding Ruach, it seems inappropriate at this point to fill in our “X” with something like daughter or granddaughter, or with any non-feminine personal relation. The main candidates are mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc.
Dove¹
The next image that is associated with the person of the Holy Spirit in Christian tradition is a dove. The figure is found in all four Gospels at the baptism of Jesus. Matthew 3:16 illustrates the point:
At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
In Hebrew יוֹנָה (yonah) the general word for dove is feminine, as is the Greek equivalent περιστερά (peristera). So the feminine pattern of primary language for the Holy Spirit persists here. Let’s investigate the word’s other associations in the Hebrew Bible. The meaning is consistently “dove” so here we will look at the associations and symbolic significance of the dove as symbol.
The first occurence is in the flood narrative, when Noah sends out a dove to find dry land. After seven days (which recall the creation in Genesis 1), she brings the olive branch that signals that the flood has come to an end. Noah waits another seven days and she leaves and does not return. And so Noah returns to the land. Here the dove is a messenger that the divine destruction of the flood has ended, a beautiful image that quavers or hovers protectively over the new creation of the baptismal scene as well.
In Leviticus and Numbers, doves are sacrificial animals which are, at points, interchangeable with turtle doves. We will touch on this more when we talk about Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis 15, under the heading of Fire. Here it is worth noting that while the lamb is the sacrifical animal closely associated with Jesus, the dove (and by extension turtle dove) are the sacrificial animal associated with the Holy Spirit.
Doves also feature in the book of Psalms three times. Their wings are associated with flight, escape, safety, distance, beauty, and authoritative and prophetic speech by women.
Psalm 55: 5–9 (NASB 1995)
Fear and trembling come upon me,
And horror has overwhelmed me.I said, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest.“Behold, I would wander far away,
I would lodge in the wilderness.“I would hasten to my place of refuge
From the stormy wind and tempest.”Confuse, O Lord, divide their tongues,
For I have seen violence and strife in the city.
Psalm 56:1, with the Hebrew transliteration and translation from the NASB 1995.
For the choir director; according to Jonath elem rehokim*. A Mikhtam of David, when the Philistines seized him in Gath.
*The silent dove of those who are far off; or The dove of the distant terebinths
Psalm 68:11–13 (NASB 1995):
The Lord gives the command;
The women who proclaim the good tidings are a great host:“Kings of armies flee, they flee,
And she who remains at home will divide the spoil!”When you lie down among the sheepfolds,
You are like the wings of a dove covered with silver,
And its pinions with glistening gold.
The Song of Songs extensively makes use of dove imagery. It functions as a term of endearment for the beloved, and the female partner is referred to as a dove. The eyes of the dove are also featured repeatedly as a way of describing beautiful eyes. As the ideal lover, the dove is also used to describe a perfect and pure female lover.
Finally, in Isaiah 38:14 (NASB 1995) the dove is associated with groans of anguish and prayer for assistance from God. Here Isaiah’s eyes are weak, not beautiful (perhaps suggesting the eyes of Leah, mother of Judah) and he moans like a dove to God:
I cried like a swift or thrush, I moaned like a mourning dove. My eyes grew weak as I looked to the heavens. I am being threatened; Lord, come to my aid!
So what do we learn about the Holy Spirit through this association with the dove in light of the Hebrew Scriptures? She is a messenger of peace, beloved and beautiful and ardently desired, who is associated with authoritative speech, especially the prophetic speech of women and of Isaiah when he is groaning in agony. The connection to groaning cannot help but bring the motif of the “birth pangs of the Messiah” in view, and the quavering of the dove connects her to the Ruach and to Jeremiah’s own shaking knees. She is then associated with the idea of groaning in distress while the knees shake, in anticipation of salvation and rescue from God.
Given that we are looking to complete the FAMILY frame here, the maternal associations with the Spirit grow substantially stronger as the dove imagery is explored. At the new birth of baptism, the Dove is the beloved partner of the lover in a moment of trial, quavering with shaking knees like Jeremiah and groaning like Isaiah’s dove. Keep in mind that in the Ancient Near East, mothers crouched over birthing bricks or a birthing stool. Birth-giving occurred from above.
Of course, a grandmother (and so on) are also mothers at some point in time, so we can’t strictly rule out something like “grandmother” at this point. Nonetheless, such an association would seem extraneous. There is nothing particular to a grandmother in this imagery, although there is much to associate the Dove, as Holy Spirit, with a mother. It would be inappropriate to associate the Dove with a child such as a daughter because of the network of associations brought in by the feminine word dove. It is a dense matrix involving lovers, hovering, sacrifice, groaning and quavering, and bringing a message of peace, security, restoration … or flight to safety, with the attendant pains of distance and exile.
Fire
The other theophany of the Holy Spirit in the Greek Scriptures begins with a powerful wind that reminds us of the Ruach, and then there are “tongues of fire” that provide a miraculous power of communication, even through language barriers. Here is Acts 2:1–6 (NASB 1995):
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance. Now there were Jews living in Jerusalem, devout men from every nation under heaven. And when this sound occurred, the crowd came together, and were bewildered because each one of them was hearing them speak in his own language.
The most common word for fire in the Hebrew Scriptures, by far, is אֵשׂ (esh). It occurs 375 times. Like Spirit and Dove, the word is feminine. In Greek, the corresponding word is πῦρ (pur), a neuter noun. The word for flame is masculine and is אוּר (ur), but occurs only five times. Additionally, the phrase “tongue of fire” is unique and we are able to trace the reference quite clearly to Isaiah 5:24, where the word for fire is the feminine “esh”. Therefore, the three primary words associated with the theophany of the Holy Spirit are all feminine in Hebrew, and in Greek two are neuter and one is feminine. Also recall that while grammatical femininity or masculinity are generally arbitrary when referring to inanimate objects, once we are considering the Holy Spirit as a person the related pronouns become significant, especially when analyzing the deep frame of FAMILY that Father and Son inevitably evoke.
The particular association between “tongue” and fire is rare, only being found in Isaiah 5:24. Here is Isaiah 5:21–24 (NASB 1995), with my bolding on the key term.
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
And clever in their own sight!Woe to those who are heroes in drinking wine
And valiant men in mixing strong drink,Who justify the wicked for a bribe,
And take away the rights of the ones who are in the right!Therefore, as a tongue of fire consumes stubble
And dry grass collapses into the flame,
So their root will become like rot and their blossom blow away as dust;
For they have rejected the law of the LORD of hosts
And despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.On this account the anger of the LORD has burned against His people,
And He has stretched out His hand against them and struck them down.
The context here involves judgment on Israel, spoken with the inspired and burning words of the prophet. It draws to mind an image of fire licking at what remains of Israel after God’s judgment on it.
Still, a general association between the tongue and language is ubiquitous in the Bible, and it is significant that Acts 2 draws Isaiah to mind even as it focuses on the primary meaning of “tongues” as language. At times, “tongues” refers to different languages, and more broadly it is used to talk about all forms of speech, with a particular emphasis on the powerful impact of speech for good or ill. The theophany in Acts, then, plays with a dual meaning of “tongue.” In both, tongue readily associates with SPEECH and fits well with the idea of Spirit as Breath, but participates less directly to anything particular to FAMILY. Consider, however, that language and nation are closely connected, and that even our word “nation” draws on a natal metaphor. In English, the phrase “mother tongue” speaks precisely to our community of birth; languages and extended families turn out to be intimately connected at a deep level. So we might suggest that FAMILY comes into view at Pentecost in a broader way: people from all over are drawn into a communicative and familial closeness by this sharing in language. The formal ritual for inviting people into this kind of sibling relationship with Christ and the church is baptism, and Acts 2 quickly leads to baptism in verse 38 (bolded):
Now when they heard this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brethren, what shall we do?”
Peter said to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. “For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself.” And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, “Be saved from this perverse generation!” So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls. They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
With the FAMILY frame in view, it is worth considering that the gift of the Holy Spirit may include the adoption to Sonship. Romans 8:15 refers to “the Spirit (πνεῦμα) of divine adoption as sons by whom we cry ‘Abba, Father’!” Here, the Ruach might be said to provide the breath that is needed to empower this cry to the Father, and to also stand in some kind of familial relationship of authority that makes Her participation also integral to adoption into sonship. So perhaps these tongues of fire do play some kind of FAMILY role after all, just as the Holy Ruach is centered in the baptism that soon follows, as gift and/or gift giver. Perhaps we should contemplate the fact that one of the greatest gifts an adoptive child can receive is the gift of a new family member who truly loves them.
While adoption doesn’t exist as a term in Hebrew, it is also central to the very first mention of “esh” in the Hebrew Bible, in Genesis 15. There we find Abraham’s offering as he seeks Sarai’s fertility. Turtle doves, which Leviticus allows to be substituted for doves, are also mentioned here in this account centered on questions of substitution.
Abram said, “O Lord GOD, what will You give me, since I am childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” And Abram said, “Since You have given no offspring to me, one born in my house is my heir.” Then behold, the word of the LORD came to him, saying, “This man will not be your heir; but one who will come forth from your own body, he shall be your heir.” And He took him outside and said, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” Then he believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. And He said to him, “I am the LORD who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it.” He said, “O Lord GOD, how may I know that I will possess it?” So He said to him, “Bring Me a three year old heifer, and a three year old female goat, and a three year old ram, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” Then he brought all these to Him and cut them in two, and laid each half opposite the other; but he did not cut the birds. The birds of prey came down upon the carcasses, and Abram drove them away.
Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, terror and great darkness fell upon him. God said to Abram, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years. “But I will also judge the nation whom they will serve, and afterward they will come out with many possessions. “As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you will be buried at a good old age. “Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.”
It came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming (אֵ֔שׁ) torch which passed between these pieces.
The covenantal promises of children, sacrifice, and fire are intimately bound up in the narrative with questions of adoption, surrogacy (in the case of Hagar), and the generation of life. A divine fire appears and burns up the sacrifice, including the split animals as well as the unsplit (turtle) dove, sealing the land covenant and assuring Abraham that he will have biological children by Sarai.
It is worth contemplating that the Christian reading of baptism involves the divine creation of a familial bond, an adoption to sonship, that at least purports to transcend human-imposed surrogacy or alternative, human imposed fictive kinship. While Abraham and Sarai’s own responses to their infertility are not approved, in time they are given fertility beyond any normal expectation given their advanced age. If the Holy Spirit is understood to truly be able to generate life, to be the true breath of life Herself, then Her presence at baptism offers a model of divine adoption that goes beyond mere human capacities as well.
Beyond these references, fire is routinely associated with sacrifice, with the Temple, with God’s abiding presence, God’s wrath and judgment, with purification and empowered prophetic speech. It is also worth noting that in the incident with the burning bush, Moses encounters God in a fire that does not consume: a non-destructive flame which therefore has an eternal capacity to burn on. When Christians personify this Fire as the Holy Spirit, it fits with the notion that She is an eternal flame, because She does not need to destroy in order to persist.
To sum up, if we understand the Holy Tongues of Fire to be another self-Revelation of the Holy Spirit in a Hebrew context, She once again draws us to use a feminine noun for Herself. Beyond this, insofar as there is a FAMILY association with these tongues it is through a play on the Babel-reversing events of Pentecost, which gives rise to a wave of intercultural adoptions to Sonship by the gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism. Her gift might also be connected, by both fire and dove, to the fulfillment of God’s familial covenant to Abraham. She can at least be connected in this way to the gift of Sarai’s fertility as well. Beyond this, it should be noted that fire generally does a great deal to flesh out the Spirit as Breath in the SPEECH frame, although the term also invites us to consider the FAMILY frame as well, connecting Her once again to the fertility of Sarai (a gift of biological generative capacity), and the adoption of baptism.
Implications of the Hebrew Study
Here we have reflected on the Hebrew background for the New Testament, which is plainly referenced in it and which would have structured the Aramaic-speaking community of Jesus. This has been a quest to see if we can identify the shape of a deep frame around FAMILY in these central terms. We didn’t enter this search in an ad hoc way, but instead on the basis of George Lakoff’s framing theory, understood in terms of its relationship to Daniel Kahneman’s (heuristically useful) psychology of System 1 and System 2. This led us to identify two deep frames: SPEECH and FAMILY. They are closely connected to the Trinity in quite obvious ways. We also found that the deep SPEECH frame ends up being filled out in an orderly way with the identification of the Son with the Word. With this, we found a basic frame pattern that is clear enough and basic enough for a child to process quite intuitively. The question that this presents us with is informed by sound psycholinguistic research, and can be understood easily by almost anyone. What concept and word best fits with the deep FAMILY frame in a way that satisfyingly completes this chart? If we had entered our study in a purely atheoretical way, I have some doubts that we would arrive at the answer we have. Nonetheless, if this simple and compelling theoretical framework is adopted I think we arrive at a quite clear best answer. And that answer is “Mother”.
Now we might seek some kind of validation for this theory in the subsequent traditions of the church. After all, if the theory is correct we would expect the deep frame to produce at least some identifications between Spirit and Mother, and we would also expect that no other familial term ends up being applied to Her. Is the Holy Spirit called Father or Sister or Grandmother, for example?
What we find in the subsequent tradition corroborates our reconstruction of the frame, although it also confirms that this deep frame is not the only player on the field. It has a substantial and enduring effect, but the tradition is more complex than a radical “deep frame determinism” would suggest. That is to say, the deep frames here constitute a powerful push on the language and thought world of writers, especially in Syriac, but the force of the deep frame is not always and everywhere insuperable. It should be noted that the thesis I’m advancing is not a strong determinism, but rather that there is substantial psycholinguistic force rooted in the frame. So we also need to notice that substantial counter-pressure arises in the other direction as well, and this results in a partially successful attempt to erase and efface the Mother in the deep linguistic frame.
The long story of how this happened, perhaps already starting with other New Testament terms such as the masculine Paraclete, is a worthwhile exploration for another day. At the end of the day, the broad outlines of the linguistic story seem clear enough at this point. There is a powerful deep frame of FAMILY involved in the Trinity, as established obviously by the first two standard terms: Father and Son. There is also a reasonably explicit deep frame around SPEECH that is completed with John 1: Speaker, Word and Breath. The remaining term in the FAMILY frame can now also be filled out for the original Hebrew and Aramaic context, with reasonable confidence: Mother. Its basic conceptual and linguistic power is, however, eventually met with linguistic and social pressures that result in Her slow erasure. But like the eraser burns on the arms of the kids I knew in High School, the effort leaves a scar. We are left with a tradition both sacred and scarred, a memory of a Mother and of the failed attempt to erase her.
I’ll close with a long citation by Sebastian Brock, the celebrated Syriac scholar, on what they failed to erase. As it turns out, those who hoped to eliminate the Mother from the deep frame of FAMILY were just chasing the wind. They never quite managed to run Her down, although they certainly tried.
Does this fact that the Holy Spirit is grammatically feminine in the earliest Syriac literature have any effect on the way people envisaged the role of the Spirit?
…
A thoroughly orthodox witness to this tradition is Aphrahat, writing in the middle of the fourth century. Aphrahat, or the Persian Sage as he was called, lived within the Sasanid Empire, and so it is no great surprise that his theological language seems archaic when compared with that of his contemporaries writing within the Roman Empire. In a work dealing mainly with virginity he has the following interpretation of Genesis 2.24 (‘a man shall leave his father and mother’):
Who is it who leaves father and mother to take a wife? The meaning is as follows: as long as a man has not taken a wife, he loves and reveres God his Father and the Holy Spirit his Mother, and he has no other love. But when a man takes a wife, then he leaves his (true) Father and his Mother.
The seeds for such an interpretation had already been sown by Philo (not that Aphrahat would have read him) in his Allegorical Interpretation (of Gen. 2–3). At 11.49, after quoting Gen. 2.24, he says:For the sake of sense-perception the Mind, when it has become her slave, abandons both God the Father of the universe, and God’s excellence and wisdom, the Mother of all things, and cleaves to and becomes one with sense-perception and is resolved into sense-perception so that the two become one flesh and one experience.
Closer to Aphrahat in time, space and spirit, however, are the Macarian Homilies, whose Syrian/Mesopotamian origin in the fourth/fifth century is now generally admitted. Here we encounter the following passage, which again reflects Gen.2.24.
It is right and-fitting, children, for you to have left all that is temporal and to have gone off to God: instead of an earthly father you are seeking the heavenly Father, and instead of a mother who is subject to corruption, you have as a Mother the excellent Spirit of God, and the heavenly Jerusalem. Instead of the brothers you have left you now have the Lord who has allowed himself to be called brother of the faithful.
It is important to realise that the image of the Holy Spirit as Mother is by no means confined to Syriac writers or to those working in a Semitic milieu. Thus Hippolytus, writing in Greek c.200, describes Isaac as an image of God the Father, his wife Rebecca as an image of the Holy Spirit, and their son Jacob as an image of Christ — or of the Church. Most striking in this respect, however, is the second Hymn of the highly cultured Synesios, Bishop of Gyrene from 410–13. After addressing the Father and the Son he turns to the Spirit:(28)I sing of the [Father’s] travail, the fecund will, the intermediary principle, the Holy Breath/Inspiration, the centre point of the Parent, the centre point of the Child: she is mother, she is sister, she is daughter; she has delivered [i.e. as midwife] the hidden root.
Examples of the same kind of imagery used of the Spirit can also be found in a few Latin writers, most notably in Marius Victorinus (mid fourth century).
Thus among early Christian writers, Greek and Latin as well as Syriac, one can find scattered pieces of evidence which may suggest that there was once a fairly widespread tradition which associated the Holy Spirit with the image of mother. The roots of such a tradition are to be found, not only in the grammatical feature of the Semitic languages where ‘Spirit’ is feminine, but also in the links which the concept of Holy Spirit will have had with the personalised figure of Wisdom and with the Jewish concept of the Divine Presence or Shekhina. As is well known, both these features are often connected with mother imagery. As far as extant early Syriac literature is concerned, however, neither Wisdom nor the Shekhina is at all prominent.
As we have seen, from the fifth century onwards a revulsion against the idea of the Holy Spirit as mother must have set in. This may partly have been due to the misuse of the imagery by some heretical groups, though another factor should also be kept in mind: in the Syriac-speaking areas of the eastern Roman Empire the large scale influx of new converts to Christianity will have included many people whose background lay in pagan cults in which a divine triad of Father, Mother and Son was prominent.The archaic tradition of the Holy Spirit as Mother did not, however, entirely disappear, for one can find occasional relics of it, albeit reduced to a simile, in much later Syriac writers. Thus the monastic writer Martyrius, writing in the first half of the seventh century, speaks of the person ‘who has been held worthy of the hovering of the all-holy Spirit, who, like a mother, hovers over us as she gives sanctification; and through her hovering over us, we are made worthy of sonship’. The term ‘hovering’ here will immediately have provided Syriac readers with three resonances, of which Genesis 1.2 is the primary one; more important, however, in the context within which Martyrius is speaking, are the resonances of the baptismal rite, where the Spirit ‘hovers over’ the font, and the eucharistic epiclesis, where the Spirit is invited to come and ‘hover over’ the Bread and the Wine and thus transform them into the Body and the Blood of Christ.
Another example of the imagery can be found in the writings of the Syrian Orthodox theologian and scholar, Moses bar Kepha (died 903): ‘the Holy Spirit hovered over John the Baptist and brought him up like a compassionate mother’.(36) For the most part, however, in later Syriac literature it will be found that ‘Grace’ has taken over the Spirit’s place as mother.
Whereas the Holy Spirit as Mother, alongside God the Father, is a feature only encountered rarely in Syriac literature, the use of female imagery is much more common. Such imagery is implied, for example, every time the term ‘hovers’ is used of the Holy Spirit — and it occurs very frequently — for this term, based as we have seen on Genesis 1.2, originally describes the action of a mother bird. Rather than explore this aspect further here, it must suffice to observe that female imagery is by no means confined to the Holy Spirit: many examples can be found (and this applies to Greek and Latin literature, as well as Syriac) where female imagery is used of the Father and the Son. What to us seems a bizarre example can be found in the Odes of Solomon (late second century?):A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord’s kindness. The Son is the cup, and the Father is he who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is she who milked him. Because his breasts were full, and it was undesirable that his milk should be ineffectually released, the Holy Spirit opened her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.
An interesting example is provided by the Syriac translation of John 1.18, ‘No one has ever seen God: the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known’. In order to render the Greek word kolpos, ‘bosom’, the Syriac translator employed a word which also means ‘womb’ (‘ubba); that at least some Syriac readers understood ‘ubba in the sense of ‘womb’ at John 1.18 is shown by a number of passages in Ephrem’s hymns, where he sets the ‘womb’ of the Father alongside the ‘womb of Mary’. Thus in the Hymns on the Resurrection, 1:7,The Word [fem.] of the Father came from his womb and put on a body in another womb: the Word proceeded from one womb to another and chaste wombs are now filled with the Word. Blessed is he who has resided in us. Ephrem happens to be a writer who is particularly fond of female imagery (even though he perhaps deliberately avoids any overt description of the Spirit as mother). Two examples will suffice here. In one of his Nativity Hymns (4.149–50) he describes the infant Christ, who sucks Mary’s breast, as himself ‘the living breast’:
He was lying there, sucking Mary’s milk, yet all created things suck from his goodness. He is the living breast; from his life the dead have sucked living breath — and come to life
Elsewhere, in the Hymns on the Church (25.18), Ephrem compares God to a wetnurse:
The Divinity is attentive to us, just as a wetnurse is to a baby, keeping back for the right time things that will benefit it, for she knows the right time for weaning, and when the child should be nourished with milk, and when it should be fed with solid bread, weighing out and providing what is beneficial to it in accordance with the measure of its growing up.
In using female imagery of God Ephrem and other Syriac writers are simply following the lead set in the biblical writings themselves where such imagery applied to God is by no means infrequent -even though traditionally male-oriented eyes have usually been blind to this. In fact, throughout Christian tradition an undercurrent can be discerned where feminine imagery is used of God, and of the individual persons of the Trinity. Thus in the medieval West, to take but one example, besides the well known case of Dame Julian of Norwich, many instances can be found in writers like St Anselm and St Bernard.
[1] The purpose of this study is to demonstrate what can be inferred already from careful attention to Scripture alone. Nonetheless, the patterns that are identifiable in the text fit within a broader context that associates the Dove with various goddesses in the Ancient Near East:
…The dove is often taken as an attribute of Ishtar (cf. the Greek etymology peristerá > peraḫ-Ištar, “birds of Ishtar.” Scholars cite a terra-cotta dove found in the Asherah temple at Nahariyah (17th century B.C.) and the lead doves from the Ishtar temple of Ashur (13th century); cf. also the dove figurines from the vicinity of the Ninmaḫ temple of Babylon and the dove-shaped attachments of gold and lapis lazuli from the royal cemetery at Ur. The earliest representation of a dove dates from the Ubaid period (4th millennium) at Tell Arpachiyah.
The dove motif appears frequently on cultic objects as early as the beginning of the third millennium (miniature terra-cotta house from the Ishtar temple at Ashur, stratum IX), on cultic vessels from the shrine of Astarte (?) at Beth-shan, at Nuzi, and in Phoenician temple replicas.39 There is an important connection between the dove and the rosette of Ishtar.
When a goddess is depicted with birds, the identification of the birds with doves is usually disputed. There is little doubt, however, about the dove on the shoulder of a (war-)goddess wearing a cloak and carrying a seven-headed club depicted on a cylinder seal from Alalakh VII (1800–1650). This goddess with a dove, attested iconographically from the beginning of the second millennium, might be identified with the bʿlt šmm rmm, “lady of the high heavens,” of Ugaritic literature.
At a very early date the “Syrian” form of the goddess with a dove spread west through Asia Minor to Greece, where the dove became an attribute of Aphrodite and Eros/Adonis, and then of Atargatis/Derketo. Doves were worshipped as sacred to Atargatis at Ashkelon, Paphos (Cyprus), and Dodona.
G. Johannes Botterweck and W. von Soden, “יוֹנָה,” ed. Helmer Ringgren, trans. David E. Green, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 35–36.